Ever wondered how many people use your favorite social network, app or digital service? You’re in luck.

Here is my monthly, running tally of how many people are using some of the top social media, digital services and mobile apps updated for November 2016 (the best I could find, at least). This list grows pretty regularly. It began with a simple listing of some of the obvious social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Skype, YouTube, WhatsApp, etc; then grew to include digital services like Amazon, Google, eBay, Netflix and Pandora; then the focus turned to APAC social and digital properties like Weibo, WeChat, JD.com, LINE and Renren; and lately, I have been focused on updating current listings, adding in new ones along with smaller niche ones that I may have overlooked at the beginning. This post now includes over 1000 listings and more are added almost weekly.

With the recent mobile explosion, the need for a fast-loading website has never been greater. Your average website visitor is only going to wait so long for a page to load before they give up and move on to another site. In fact, according to Kissmetrics, nearly half of web users expect a website to load in 2 seconds or less[1]. This behavior is magnified when talking about mobile visitors. Your average person searching for something on their phone generally has less time to do it in and less patience.

Need more evidence that page speed matters? There have been rumors that Google has been testing a slow website tag in search results. This may or may not come to fruition as Google is constantly testing new search features almost daily and only a few of them stick, but it still illustrates that the issue is critical enough for Google to be concerned about page speed as a user experience issue for their searchers.

These days, page speed is almost as much of a moving target and inexact science as SEO is. You just can’t strip down your site of all images and functionality to make it lightening quick. There are features you need on your content marketing site to be successful and images are a must for any content site these days. What is important is to be able to measure the load speed of your site’s pages (note: load time can vary greatly form page to page on the same site, depending on what kind of content the page contains), identify which elements of your site are the time sucks and figure out if you really need them and if you do, how to optimize them.

Few companies have impacted digital marketing like WordPress. WordPress’ simple and free content management system(CMS) and endless library of free and (relatively) inexpensive themes and plug-ins have made creating an awesome website that has dynamic and optimized content a DIY project for many business owners and marketers. While custom development certainly has its benefits, WordPress has leveled the digital marketing playing field just a bit for smaller businesses trying to compete with major companies with large marketing budgets. WordPress is such an impressive web platform that even some of the larger sites on the web have built their sites on it and a number of established web developers have switched to WordPress as their CMS of choice to build on.

Backing up your website regularly should be a no-brainer, but for many publishers, it is often put off in favor of more content generation or adding site functionality. It is very similar to backing up your computer files; we all know we need to do it, we just don’t put a high priority on it and often don’t until something catastrophic happens.

Digital marketers love blogging platforms like WordPress because of their simplicity and easy-to-add functionality. Of course, many of us, at times, fall into the trap of focusing more on functionality and aesthetics and less on the basics like pagespeed.

OK kids, the day we have all been dreading for month is almost upon us. Next Monday, July 1st is the day that Google Reader is no longer. There are a number of potential Google Reader replacements that will be coming out over the next few weeks. AOL, Digg and even Facebook (maybe) are all […]